git @2.29.2_0: gitk calls system "wish", which aborts

[iay (Ian Young)]

The MacPorts "git" port assumes a working version of tck/tk supplied by the system rather than having dependencies on those ports. I'm sure there are reasons for this, but one side-effect is that the git port is relying on a working system-supplied "wish" application.

Unfortunately, it looks like on macOS 11.1 this is not the case:

$ /usr/bin/wish
macOS 11 or later required !
/usr/bin/wish: line 2:  4353 Abort trap: 6           "$(dirname $0)/../../System/Library/Frameworks/Tk.framework/Versions/8.5/Resources/Wish.app/Contents/MacOS/Wish" "$@"

The "wish" application is invoked by gitk, so this means that the gitk from the git port doesn't work either.

This seems to be architecture-independent and true both for upgraded versions of macOS and fresh installs. I have opened a feedback with Apple.

We could obviously address this by taking dependencies on the tcl and tk ports, but I suspect there were good reasons for not doing that in the first place.

The good news is that if you're affected by this, you can work round the issue by installing those ports manually:

$ sudo port install tcl tk +quartz

(Adding the quartz variant to tk so that an X server is not required.)

[iay (Ian Young)]

The issue with /usr/bin/wish appears to have been addressed at some time before 11.3.1, so upgrading to the latest OS also avoids this issue.

Ticket can be closed.

[raimue (Rainer Müller)]

Closing as reported above.